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Project conditional formatting - creating a custom field

Changing the colour of task bars in a Gantt Chart is a relatively simple
process, but getting the bars to change colour automatically based on
information in the task table is much more complicated! This blog series
explains how to go about creating conditional formats for task bars in Microsoft
Project 2003 and 2007.

The Holy Grail of formatting in Project: Gantt chart bars that change colour automatically based on task information.

Creating a Custom Field

Our goal is to create a conditional format that will change the colour of a
task bar when a particular resource is assigned to a task - specifically, task
bars will turn red when Santa is assigned to that task (silly example, useful
technique!). The first step in creating a conditional format in a Gantt chart is
to create a custom field. To do this, from the menu choose: Tools
-> Customize -> Fields…

To make
things more clear we can temporarily insert the custom field into the task
table. To do this:

Right-click the top of any column in the table and choose
Insert Column…

You can now choose which field you want to insert.

Choose the field you customised earlier and then
click OK

You should now have a column in the table that you can manually select
Yes and No from. Our next task is to create a
task bar format based on this field - read the next part of this series to find
out how!